The Courage of the Shut Mouth
by Rockapotamus
Summary: As the girl wilts, a glimmer of silver slips from her shirt collar, catching the light. Aldo narrows his eyes at it. Just as Donny is preparing to bring his bat down, he recognizes the small charm: the star of David.
1. Boots

I realize this has been done a million times before, but I was writing some drabbles based off one-word prompts, and the drabbles each turned into a separate chapter for this.

Hope you like it!

I own nothing but Adalyn.

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They've been moving through Germany swiftly and silently, coming upon Nazi groups and murdering them all. Their name spreads through Germany like wildfire. _Basterds_, the people whisper. _Basterds_, Hans Landa's men tell him. In the trees, in the rain, in the bitter wind: _Basterds_.

They ambush Nazis in the woods (after a while, one would think the Nazis would get smarter, travel along busy roads and through towns; they never do), and here they are again, crouched in ditches running parallel to the road. Aldo is staring up the road, the familiar sound of a car puttering up making him grin.

"Let's get crackin', boys," he calls. He steps out into the middle of the road, knowing he'll catch the car's attention (and knowing it'll be gunned down before it will ever reach him).

He sends Donny to drag out any survivors. There are 3--an aging Nazi, a defiant young man, and a terrified teenage girl. The young man cracks--anyone could have predicted that--and they send him away with a fresh swastika bleeding on his forehead. The aging Nazi they kill. The girl, however, presents a bigger problem.

She looks no more than 17. Her eyes are dark, her short bob of brown hair reaching just past her ears.

"She doesn't look like a Nazi," Wicki says to Aldo. They both eye her critically. Donny is standing near her, his bat glistening with fresh blood.

"Donny!" Aldo barks. "What d'you think?"

Donny tips her chin upward with his bat--when he takes it from her skin, smudges of blood are left behind. She says nothing; her eyes are huge with fear.

"Nazi spy," he says finally. Aldo nods, trusting Donny's word, and leans back impassively. The Basterds all watch in surprise as Donny walks toward the girl; Utivich looks horrified.

"Lieutenant," Wicki hisses fervently, face inches away from Aldo's. "We don't kill children."

"A Nazi's a Nazi," Aldo replies coldly, watching Donny raise his bat.

The girl screws her eyes shut, dips her head forward in a quiet sort of surrender. As she wilts, a glimmer of silver slips from her shirt collar, catching the light. Aldo narrows his eyes at it. Just as Donny is preparing to bring his bat down, he recognizes the small charm.

The star of David.

"Donowitz!" He yells, an almost panicked edge to his voice bringing Donny to a screeching halt. The girl shudderingly inhales.

Aldo stalks over to her, his boots crunching across the dead leaves. She doesn't open her eyes until he's standing right before her. He kneels and takes the charm in his hand, examining it critically.

"You a Jew?" He asks her harshly. He's more angry at his own slip-up than at her; she flinches anyways. After a moment she nods.

He stares at her, at her trembling chin, at her eyelashes matted with tears. "D'you talk?" He asks. She glances up at him, purses her lips together, and shakes her head.

Aldo curses inwardly, sweeps away from her. She hugs herself, a thin pile of sadness on the leafy floor. The Basterds watch her; Aldo doesn't need to be looking at them to know what lurks beneath their eyes.

"How far away's the next town?" He asks Wicki in hushed tones. The man shrugs.

"Bout 3 days travel," he replies. Aldo casts a look at the dejected girl. She has her head bowed; he can see her shaking from here.

"Well, fuck," he groans, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Guess we gotta take her sorry ass with us, to make sure she ain't gettin' in any more trouble."

Wicki nods. He doesn't need to tell the lieutenant that the only reason they're taking the girl is because Aldo wants to make amends for the fact he almost killed her. Aldo already knows.


	2. Gasoline

Adalyn travels between the big man and the one with the painful scar on his neck, trying to make herself as small as possible in the space she has.

She doesn't know what to make of them. She had been sure of her death on that forested road, sure of the big man's bat crashing into her skull--but then again, hadn't she been just as sure of her death at the end of a Nazi pistol? When her necklace had fallen from her shirt she had considered grabbing it, for strength, for hope.

It's a damn good thing she hadn't.

She understands English just enough to get the gist of what goes on around her. They're taking her to the nearest town, she knows. Beyond that, she tunes them out. She finds it rude to listen in on others' conversations, and she'd been raised to be polite.

Still, no matter how polite it is, she can't bring herself to speak whenever they ask her a question. It hurts too much. Every time she opens her mouth she can taste gasoline, see the fire licking at her parents' prone bodies, and she can do nothing else but shut down.

They don't prod her, for the most part. Their stares are a bit uncomfortable, but after riding in cars full of Nazis, she sees them as harmless (it's a bit further from the truth than she'd like to think).

She wakes in a cold sweat that night, curled on the ground with the scar man's coat draped over her. She jerks upright, hair mussing about her face. Her ribs are being crushed beneath an invisible weight, her lungs are puncturing, she is being drowned in her own blood _God no--_

A rustle to her left and she whirls. The scar man is sitting on a rock near the dying embers of their fire, eyes glinting dim orange back at her. She is frozen, held in his gaze like a small animal being stared down by a predator.

"You can sleep, y'know," he tells her. If it's difficult enough for her to understand unaccented English, she has to _really_ strain to decipher what he's saying. "We ain't the enemy in this hellhole."

She wants to tell him something, anything--tell him she knows it's safe, tell him it might take a while for her to really sleep normal again, tell him--

Thank you.

She opens her mouth and then there's the image of her house on the back of her eyelids, reduced to nothing but a charred skeleton, and she can't, _she can't_.

He watches her and nods after a long moment.

"I ain't expectin' you to go talkin' up a storm," he tells her quietly. It's his own way of saying he understands.

She sleeps easier after that.


	3. Mouse

Utivich watches the girl. She's got big brown eyes, delicate wrists, long eyelashes. There's sadness in the cupid's bow dip of her pretty pink mouth, and he can't help but want to whisk it away. She's abnormally frail--he supposes it's the starvation she's probably been put through--and the only thing that keeps her anchored in reality is the thick black of her clothes. Her skin is a bright contrast to the dreary woods around them. So he stares.

He gives her some bread the second day she's with them. She takes it timidly, a mouse amongst the hulking beasts of the Basterds. He looks away for a moment and when he looks back it's gone. She brushes crumbs delicately from her shirtfront.

He finds himself talking to her whenever there's a lull in action, finds himself telling her things he hasn't even told himself in a while. She's a receptacle, nothing but a clean young face and big bright eyes and he'll realize sheepishly he's been talking to her for far too long. But she listens, all the same.

She doesn't talk. He doesn't know if she physically can't, or just chooses not to. He decides on the latter when he sees her with Aldo, sees her nearly talk but no words come out. Aldo murmurs something to her and she walks away, upset.

Utivich always shares his food with her. She never specifically tells him 'thank you'; he hears it all the same.


	4. Memories

The second night she lays awake, staring at the sleeping men around her (she knows all their names now), at the cold stars above her. The thick velvet of the night air presses down on her chest; she feels suffocated.

She gets up to walk around, making sure Donny sees her (she doesn't want to get nearly to freedom only to be killed by one of the 'good guys'). She stands by a small river, watching the water gurgle at her feet. She's still there when Donny walks up to her, his bat over his shoulder.

"I knew a girl like you once," he tells her, staring out into the darkness. She watches him, but he doesn't look at her. The silence stretches for minutes, hours, days. "I almost killed you."

The words are small and ugly; she recognizes it as an apology after a moment. She reaches out, nearly touches his shoulder before thinking better of it. Instead, she just nods, forgiveness in the dip of her neck and the soft downward slope of her eyelashes. He gives her one long look before returning to camp. Something in her chest aches.

She wakes to Aldo shaking her. The weak, watery light of the morning sun speckles across Aldo, makes him look almost otherworldly. She squints, rubs her eyes.

"Rise an' shine, princess," he says to her, grinning good-naturedly. She sits up and comes face to face with a pale blue flower. "Made me think'a you." She takes it slowly, glances up at Aldo. She can feel heat crawl up her cheeks and she quickly looks away, embarrassed.

She'll press it between the pages of her favorite book later on; she'll be reading years later and it'll fall out, thin yet heavy with memories.


	5. Connection

It's nearing the middle of the day. The Basterds are in a cheery mood, their morale boosted by the upcoming town. They'll never admit it, but they'll be glad to have the girl safe.

So maybe it's the fact that they're drunk off happiness; maybe it's the fact that the Germans have gotten smarter; maybe it's just an atrocious stroke of bad luck. But whatever it is, it happens fast. The sharp staccato of gunfire begins, and all of a sudden the ambusher becomes the ambushee.

She notices that Aldo shoots her a backward glance, locking eyes with her. Amid the whiz of bullets, the fact he's thinking about her gives her a welcome comfort; she manages to breathe.

The Basterds, for all their foolish antics, are more than good at what they do--they are seamless, nearly professional. She watches as one by one, the German soldiers fall. Finally, in a last-ditch attempt, the Germans swarm down onto the road, surrounding them.

It's their last mistake (the first was trying to ambush the Basterds in the first place). In close quarters, the men wreak havoc. Adalyn watches with wide eyes at the death around her, her stomach twisting into hard knots.

It's too much. The sound of skulls splitting open, of men dying right outside the car window, of life ending. The bright, bright red of blood spilling across the ground, blooming like sick flowers. Everything is too much; it hurts her.

She covers her ears, keeping her eyes trained on Aldo. He's soothing, somehow--fluid, calm. She's still watching when a man catches him in a powerful grip, grappling with the Lieutenant. She's still watching when, unbeknownst to Aldo, another German soldier begins to sneak up on them.

Her breath siphons away. She can feel her heart fluttering against her ribcage like some sort of frightened moth caught in a spider web, and her mouth is cottony.

Aldo, she tries to say.

--_flames right at her feet, it was so hot, she couldn't breathe_--

"Aldo," she whispers. Her voice is cracked through disuse.

--_that popping sound was her parents, some part of her knew, the popping of flesh, sizzling_--

Aldo is suddenly her parents; her neighbor Katya; the perpetually happy shopkeeper from down the street. He is the hundreds of Jews in her hometown that were killed; he is the thousands of innocent people dying in Germany.

_"Aldo!"_ She screams. The sound is strangled, high-pitched. It startles the Basterds and the few remaining Germans into freezing; they all stare at her, disbelieving.

It is Aldo who reacts first. He cuts the throat of the man before him, then whirls and jams his knife into the skull of his would-be attacker. The two men fall--Adalyn feels a grip on her throat loosen.

The rest of the Germans are killed systematically, exterminated like rats. She knows she shouldn't be feeling empathy (she can't help it). The Basterds are all left standing breathless, the clearing unnaturally calm, the woods eerily silent.

Adalyn has her head in her hands, hunched over in the front seat of the truck. She doesn't want to look up; she doesn't want to see the carnage around her. She's never been one for war.

Aldo crunches up to the car, kneels before her. She peers through her fingers at him.

"Saved my life back there, kid," he says. His voice is quiet, unassuming.

She nods.

"I thought we got ya to speakin' now," he chides softly. He smiles at her; she smiles back.

"Yeah," she replies shakily. Her voice is raspy but it's there--_it's there_--and he smiles bigger. The fact that it's heavily-accented German doesn't seem to bother him. He's got blood on his face, she realizes-- she impulsively reaches out and wipes it off with thin fingers, revealing no cut beneath.

His lips part and he abruptly turns away.

"Let's get back in the saddle," he yells to the Basterds, and after a few moments, they're on their way again.

They leave her with some friends of theirs who will take her to England, get her out of harm's way. The sun is bright in the sky when they leave; she squints her eyes against its onslaught.

She says goodbye to each of the men, reveling in the return of her voice. None of them show too much emotion (although Utivich does give her a half-hearted hug, and Donny rests his hand lightly on her shoulder for a moment). The last person she says goodbye to is Aldo.

They stare at each other. Some kind of soft voracity curls in her stomach, loops lightly around her spine, and she leans forward the slightest bit.

"Goodbye," she says, the vowels thick with her German accent.

"Don't be gettin' into too much more trouble now," he tells her gruffly. But he reaches up; for the briefest moment he grasps her chin. It's quick and then it's gone, however, and she's left with an aching she can't explain and the image of his face burned into his mind.

She'll hear about them in England, she knows. And it's the only connection to them she'll have for a long, long time.

--

Hope you all liked it! Read and Review please!


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